There is a technology in which the category of an object is recognized according to the similarity degree calculated such that the feature amount of the object is detected from the image data of the object photographed by an image capturing section and the feature amount detected is compared with the feature amount data registered in the recognition dictionary file to calculate the similarity degree of the object. Such a technology for recognizing the object included in an image is called as a generic object recognition. As to the technologies of the generic object recognition, various recognition technologies are disclosed in the following document.
Keiji Yanai “The Current State and Future Directions on Generic Object Recognition”, Journal of Information Processing Society, Vol. 48, No. SIG16 [Search on Heisei 22 August 10], Internet <URL: http://mm.cs.uec.ac.jp/IPSJ-TCVIM-Yanai.pdf>
In addition, the technology carrying out the generic object recognition by area division of the image for each object is described in the following document.
Jamie Shotton etc, “Semantic Texton Forests for Image Categorization and Segmentation”, [Search on Heisei 22 August 10], Internet <URL:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.145.3036&rep=repl&type-pdf>
In recent years, for example, the generic object recognition technology is proposed to be applied to a recognition apparatus for recognizing a commodity, especially a commodity on which a barcode is not applied, such as vegetables, fruits and the like purchased by a customer in a checkout system (POS system) of a retail store. In this technology, the feature amount data for representing the surface information, such as, appearance shape, color (tint), pattern, and concave-convex (surface roughness) of a recognition target commodity in the form of parameters is stored in the recognition dictionary file. The commodity recognition apparatus detects the feature amount of appearance of a commodity from the image of the commodity captured by the image capturing section and compares the detected feature amount with the feature amount data of each commodity registered in the recognition dictionary file. And then the commodity recognition apparatus outputs a commodity similar in a feature amount to the recognized commodity as a candidate of recognized commodity.
In addition, in the same checkout system, a technology in which a specific character string is recognized from the image data of the object photographed by the image capturing section is also known.